Orde on the Line

On the phone from Belfast on Tuesday, Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Chief Constable Hugh Orde was seeking to reassure Irish Americans that the latest scandal involving the police in Northern Ireland was not representative of the force today.

It was a measure of how serious the crisis over Special Branch involvement with a Loyalist death squad was that Orde was reaching out personally to Irish Americans to try and reassure.

The crisis was revealed by Ombudswoman Nuala O’Loan on Monday, whose investigation into the death of a Protestant man, Raymond McCord, 22, concluded the murder had been carried out by a UVF hit squad with the full backing of senior RUC officers. It was one of 15 such murders carried out by the gang and approved by the RUC Special Branch.

Yet Orde readily admitted that “a couple” of officers who took part in the death squad management were still on the force.

“The vast majority of officers involved left some time ago, there are a couple still employed,” Orde told the Irish Voice. Orde stated he would have to look at those officers as part of a total review. He pointed to the fact that previous investigations had been hampered by destroyed documents.

It seems passing strange, however, that the offending officers, even though Orde states they were junior at the time, are still allowed on the new force, given the need for a clear break with the past for the PSNI.

The excuse that what is in the past should stay there does not work in this case. The new PSNI, if it is to be effective, simply has to rid itself of the rotten apples, even from a decade and a half ago. There is no other way forward.

Orde Knew About McCord

In his interview with the Irish Voice Orde admitted that he was privy to some of this McCord information himself when he was a key member of the Stevens Inquiry set up in 1999 which was looking at the death of Pat Finucane, the civil rights lawyer slain by a Loyalist paramilitary gang in 1989.

Orde stated that he did receive a letter from Raymond McCord Sr. with information about his son’s murder and that names were named . He stated that he immediately sent it to Sir Ronnie Flanagan, then the chief constable. Flanagan wrote back shortly after stating that the letter had been referred to the head of the crime division in the RUC.

Orde freely admits then that he knew the names of some of those accused of collusion in the case. Why, then, was he unable to deal with them when he became chief constable in 2002 in succession to Flanagan?

He doesn’t duck the question but states that the police service could not be “reformed overnight” and that he “needed the right people in place” before he acted on it.

He points out it was a “very murky and dirty war” on both sides, and that trying to carry out successful prosecutions in the midst of reforming the entire force, especially with so much evidence missing and destroyed, was a very difficult task.

The Bad RUC Apples

Orde reserves particular anger for those police officers who refused to cooperate with the O’Loan inquiry and have since been forced out of the PSNI.

“They abrogated their responsibility.” he says. “My view is that it was unacceptable behavior by them.”

However, he remains convinced it was still a relatively small number of bad apples who have created this crisis.

What then about those who believe that the O’Loan report is just the tip of the iceberg, and that many other Loyalist death squads over the 25 years of the Troubles were directed by Special Branch officers?

Orde says he does not believe it was anything as widespread as that. Either way he says that is the past. He is focused on his force now and says it would be impossible for anyone to act in such a manner in the new dispensation.

Of course with the Troubles effectively over, the era of the death squads is too. The entire episode reveals just how rotten and corrupt the entire Special Branch division were and how much of a law unto themselves they became.

The British government had oversight over the RUC all those decades, yet did nothing but encourage the lawbreakers in their ranks. As for Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the former chief constable who always made much of his intention to clean up the force — it is clear now he was as complicit as anyone in what happened under his watch.

Irish Americans Vindicated

One group that has every right to be pleased at the new revelations are those hardy band of Irish American congressmen from the Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs, who always argued that collusion and corruption were at the heart of the RUC.

So stand up and take a bow Congressmen Peter King, Joe Crowley, Jim Walsh, Eliot Engel, Chris Smith, Donald Payne and others who fought long and hard to have the evidence revealed in both the Finucane case and other collusion cases.

Kudos also to the many Irish American organizations who also fought the good fight on this. It’s just a shame that famed civil rights lawyer Frank Durkan is not around to see this day. He always believed passionately that collusion and murder was at the heart of the old RUC. It turns out he was not wrong.